Courtney Love Biography

Courtney Michelle Love (born Courtney Michelle Harrison; July 9, 1964) is an American musician, singer-songwriter, actress, artist, and author. Love rose to prominence as the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of alternative rock band Hole, which she formed in 1989. Her unpredictable stage presence and confrontational lyrics made her a fixture in alternative music media in the 1990s, and her personal life and battles with drug addiction have been widely publicized.

Hole received praise from indie rock critics for their debut album Pretty on the Inside (1991), produced by Kim Gordon, and their second release, Live Through This (1994), went certified platinum and received wide critical acclaim. After the release of their third album, Celebrity Skin (1998), Love and bandmate Eric Erlandson retired Hole, and she released her first solo album, America's Sweetheart in 2004 to underwhelming sales. In 2009, she re-formed Hole with new members and released Nobody's Daughter (2010), which received mixed-positive reviews. In December 2012, Love stated that she was abandoning the Hole moniker and returning to performing as a solo artist, and was recording material for an upcoming album titled Died Blonde.

In addition to music, Love had an intermittent acting career, starring in Alex Cox's cult films Sid and Nancy (1986) and Straight to Hell (1987), and later returning to acting with a lead role in Milo? Forman's The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), which earned her a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of Althea Flynt. Love has also had endeavors in art, fashion, and writing.

Love is the daughter of psychotherapist Linda Carroll, and writer and ex-Grateful Dead manager Hank Harrison. She was married to Kurt Cobain, frontman of the grunge band Nirvana, who committed suicide in 1994. She has one daughter with Cobain, Frances Bean Cobain.

Early life

Love was born Courtney Michelle Harrison in San Francisco, California to psychotherapist Linda Carroll and Hank Harrison, publisher and brief manager of the Grateful Dead. Love's parents divorced in 1969 and her father's custody was withdrawn after her mother alleged that he had fed LSD to Love. Her mother moved the family to the rural community of Marcola, Oregon, where they lived on a commune. Love struggled in school and was diagnosed as mildly autistic. Love has two younger half-sisters, two half-brothers, and one adopted brother; another male half-sibling had died in infancy of a heart defect when Love was ten.

In 1972, Love's mother moved the family to New Zealand, but Love was sent back to live in Oregon with her former stepfather and numerous family friends. She auditioned for the Mickey Mouse Club in Seattle at age twelve, but was rejected after reading a Sylvia Plath poem for her audition. At age fourteen, she was arrested for shoplifting a t-shirt and was sent to Hillcrest Correctional Facility. She spent the following several years in and out of foster homes before becoming legally emancipated at age sixteen. She moved to Portland, Oregon, and supported herself by working illegally as an erotic dancer, a DJ, and various odd jobs, and intermittently took classes at Portland State University studying English and philosophy. Love has said that she "didn't have a lot of social skills", and that she learned them while frequenting gay clubs in Portland.

In 1981, Love was granted a small trust fund through her adoptive grandparents, which she used to travel to Ireland; there, she was accepted into Trinity College due to high test scores, and studied theology for two semesters. In the United Kingdom, she became acquainted with musician Julian Cope in Liverpool and moved into his house briefly before returning to the United States. Love continued to relocate between Oregon and California, enrolling at San Francisco State University and the San Francisco Art Institute, where she studied under George Kuchar. She later took stint jobs doing erotic dancing in Japan. In 1986, Love landed roles in two Alex Cox films (see Acting career), and then quit acting and retreated to Anchorage, Alaska for several months where she returned to stripping to support herself.

Music career

1981-1988: Early projects

Love initially began several music projects in the 1980s, first forming Sugar Babydoll, and then having a brief stint as a singer in Faith No More; according to Roddy Bottum, the group wanted a "male energy", and Love was kicked out of the band, though she and Bottum maintained a friendship in the years after. Love later formed the Pagan Babies with friend Kat Bjelland, Jennifer Finch and Janis Tanaka in 1985, recording one 4-track demo before disbanding. Love briefly played bass in Bjelland's group Babes In Toyland in 1987 before being ejected from the band.

1989-2002: Hole

In 1989, Love taught herself to play guitar and relocated to Los Angeles, where she placed an ad in a local music zine, reading: "I want to start a band. My influences are Big Black, Sonic Youth, and Fleetwood Mac" to which guitarist Eric Erlandson replied. Love recruited Erlandson as lead guitarist, Lisa Roberts, her neighbor, as bassist, and drummer Caroline Rue. Hole played their first show in November 1989 at Raji's after three months of rehearsal. The band's debut single, "Retard Girl", was issued in April 1990 through the Long Beach indie label Sympathy for the Record Industry, and was given air-time by Rodney Bingenheimer's local station, KROQ. The following year, the band released their second single, "Dicknail" through Sub Pop Records.

Influenced by no wave and noise rock bands, Hole's first studio album, Pretty on the Inside, was released in August 1991 on Caroline Records, produced by Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, with assistant production from Gumball's Don Fleming. The album received generally positive critical reception, and was labeled one of the 20 best albums of the year by Spin Magazine. It also gained a following in the United Kingdom, charting at 59 on the UK Albums Chart, as well as its lead single, "Teenage Whore" entering the country's indie chart at number one. In support of the record, the band toured in Europe headlining with Mudhoney, and extensively in the United States opening for The Smashing Pumpkins, including shows at the Whisky A Go Go and CBGB.

Hole recorded their second album, titled Live Through This, in October 1993 in Atlanta, Georgia. The album featured a new lineup, with bassist Kristen Pfaff and drummer Patty Schemel. Live Through This was released on Geffen's subsidiary DGC label in April 1994, four days after Love's husband, Kurt Cobain, was found dead of a self-inflicted shotgun wound in their home. Two months later, in June 1994, bassist Kristen Pfaff died of a heroin overdose, and Love was forced to recruit Melissa Auf der Maur for the band's impending tour. Throughout the months preceding the tour, Love was rarely seen in public, spending her time at her Seattle home, or visiting the Namgyal Buddhist Monastery in New York.

Live Through This was an immense commercial and critical success, receiving rave reviews from major music periodicals and going certified platinum. Beginning in August 1994, the band embarked on a worldwide tour in support of the record. The tour became a media spectacle due to Love's fraught emotional state, which led her to provoke fans, throw guitars into the audience, destroy equipment, cry, and break into screaming fits onstage. In retrospect, Love openly admitted to having been "completely high" for the majority of the band's 1994 and 1995 performances.

BBC's John Peel wrote a periodical on the band's controversial performance at the 1994 Reading Festival, summarizing the reckless tone that pervaded the tour, noting:

Courtney's first appearance backstage certainly caught the attention. Swaying wildly and with lipstick smeared on her face, hands and, I think, her back, as well as on the collar of her dress, the singer would have drawn whistles of astonishment in Bedlam. After a brief word with supporters at the foot of the stage, she reeled away, knocking over a wastebin, and disappeared. Minutes later she was onstage giving a performance which verged on the heroic ... Love steered her band through a set which dared you to pity either her recent history or that of the band ... the band teetered on the edge of chaos, generating a tension which I cannot remember having felt before from any stage.

In February 1995, Hole performed an acoustic set on MTV Unplugged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and continued to tour late into the year, concluding their world tour with an appearance at the 1995 MTV Video Music Awards, in which they performed "Violet", and were nominated for Best Music Video for "Doll Parts".

In 1997, the band released a compilation album, My Body, The Hand Grenade, and, in September 1998, released their third studio album, Celebrity Skin, which marked something of a transformation for Love, featuring a stark power pop sound as opposed to the group's earlier punk rock influences. Love divulged her ambition of making an album where "art meets commerce ... there are no compromises made, it has commercial appeal, and it sticks to the [our] original vision." She claimed to have been influenced by Neil Young, Fleetwood Mac, and My Bloody Valentine when writing the album. Celebrity Skin was well received by critics; Rolling Stone called the album "accessible, fiery and intimate"?often at the same time ... a basic guitar record that's anything but basic." Celebrity Skin went on to go multi-platinum, and topped "Best of Year" lists at Spin, the Village Voice, and other periodicals. The album garnered the band their first and only No. 1 hit single on the Modern Rock Tracks chart with the title track "Celebrity Skin".

Prior to the release and promotion of Celebrity Skin, Love and Fender designed a low-priced Squier brand guitar, called Vista Venus. The instrument featured a shape inspired by Mercury, Stratocaster, and Rickenbacker's solidbodies and had a single-coil and a humbucker pickup, and was available in 6-string and 12-string versions. In an early 1999 interview, Love said about the Venus: "I wanted a guitar that sounded really warm and pop, but which required just one box to go dirty (... ) And something that could also be your first band guitar. I didn't want it all teched out. I wanted it real simple, with just one pickup switch."

After touring for Celebrity Skin finished, Auf der Maur left the band to tour with The Smashing Pumpkins; Hole's touring drummer Samantha Maloney left soon after. Love and Erlandson continued to pursue with the band, and released the single "Be A Man""? an outtake from the Celebrity Skin sessions"? for the soundtrack of the Oliver Stone film Any Given Sunday (1999). The group became dormant in the following two years, and on May 24, 2002, officially announced their breakup amid continuing litigation with Universal Music Group over their record contract.

2003-2012: Solo career, Hole reformation

With Hole in disarray, Love began a "punk rock femme supergroup" called Bastard during autumn 2001, enlisting Schemel, Veruca Salt co-frontwoman Louise Post, and bassist Gina Crosley. Though a demo was completed, the project never reached fruition.

In 2002, Love began composing an album with Linda Perry, titled America's Sweetheart. Love signed with Virgin Records to release it, and initially recorded it in France, but was forced by the label to re-record the entire album in the summer of 2003. America's Sweetheart was released in February 2004, and was embraced by critics with mixed reviews. Spin called it a "jaw-dropping act of artistic will and a fiery, proper follow-up to 1994's Live Through This" and awarded it eight out of ten stars, while Rolling Stone suggested that, "for people who enjoy watching celebrities fall apart, America's Sweetheart should be more fun than an Osbournes marathon." The album sold 86,000 copies in its first three months, with the singles "Mono" and "Hold on to Me", both of which earned competent spots on album charts.

Love has publicly expressed her regret over the record several times, calling it "a crap record" and reasoning that her drug issues at the time were to blame. Shortly after the record was released, Love told Kurt Loder on TRL: "I cannot exist as a solo artist. It's a joke."

In 2006, Love started recording what was going to be her second solo album, How Dirty Girls Get Clean, collaborating again with Perry and Billy Corgan in the writing and recording. Love had written several songs, including an anti-cocaine song titled "Loser Dust", during her time in rehab in 2005.

Some tracks and demos from the album (initially planned for release in 2008) were leaked on the internet in 2006, and a documentary entitled The Return of Courtney Love, detailing the making of the album, aired on the British television network in the fall of that year. A rough acoustic version of "Never Go Hungry Again", recorded during an interview for The Times in November, was also released. Incomplete audio clips of the song "Samantha", originating from an interview with NPR, were also distributed on the internet in 2007.

On June 17, 2009, NME reported that Hole would be reuniting. Former Hole guitarist Erlandson stated in Spin magazine that contractually no reunion can take place without his involvement; therefore Nobody's Daughter would remain Love's solo record, as opposed to a "Hole" record. Love responded to Erlandson's comments in a Twitter post, claiming "he's out of his mind, Hole is my band, my name, and my Trademark".

Nobody's Daughter was released worldwide as a Hole album on April 27, 2010. For the new line-up, Love recruited guitarist Micko Larkin, Shawn Dailey (bass guitar), and Stu Fisher (drums, percussion). Nobody's Daughter featured a great deal of material written and recorded for Love's aborted solo album, How Dirty Girls Get Clean, including "Pacific Coast Highway", "Letter to God", "Samantha", and "Never Go Hungry", although they were re-produced with Larkin. The first single from Nobody's Daughter was "Skinny Little Bitch", which became a hit on alternative rock radio in early March 2010.

The album received mixed reviews. Rolling Stone gave the album three out of five stars, saying that Love "worked hard on these songs, instead of just babbling a bunch of druggy bullshit and assuming people would buy it, the way she did on her 2004 flop, America's Sweetheart." Slant Magazine also gave the album three out of five stars, saying "It's Marianne Faithfull's substance-ravaged voice that comes to mind most often while listening to songs like "Honey" and "For Once in Your Life." The latter track is, in fact, one of Love's most raw and vulnerable vocal performances to date. Co-penned by Linda Perry, the song offers a rare glimpse into the mind of a woman who, for the last 15 years, has been as famous for being a rock star as she's been for being a victim."

The album's subject matter was largely centered on Love's tumultuous life between 2003 and 2007, and featured a polished folk-rock sound with much more acoustic work than previous Hole albums. Love stated that she remained celibate for nearly five years in the process of working on the album: "I needed to put all of my energy into this record. Like, all of it, and [sex and love] can be really distracting", she said. Love and the band toured internationally from 2010 into late 2012 promoting the record.

2013-present: Return to solo career

In October 2012, Love told Rolling Stone that she was dropping the Hole moniker and returning to a solo career. She also stated she had just recorded a new track, titled "This Is War", produced by James Iha. Love also completed studio work on "Rio Grande", a duet with Michael Stipe, as well as contributing guest vocals on Fall Out Boy's album, Save Rock and Roll (2013).

On December 29, 2012, Love performed a surprise solo acoustic set at the Electric Room in New York City, where she performed "Miss World". In January 2013, Love performed at the Star Bar in Park City, Utah for the Sundance Film Festival, with a set that included an acoustic cover of Jay-Z's "99 Problems".

On May 10, 2013 it was announced that Love had booked an eighteen-date tour of North America in the summer. Initially, the tour had been conceived to promote Love's new album, but was consequently dubbed a "greatest hits" tour due to the impending release of the record; according to Love, it will be released in December 2013, followed by a more extensive world tour beginning thereafter. She stated that she will refrain from performing any of the new material until it is officially released.

Love told Billboard that she had recorded eight songs for the upcoming album, which is under the working title Died Blonde, and also planned to release a double single with the tracks "California" and "Wedding Day". "[These songs] are not my usual (style)," Love said. "I don't have any Fleetwood Mac references on it. Usually I always have a Fleetwood Mac reference as well as having, like, Big Black references. These are very unique songs that sort of magically happened."

Influences

Love was exposed to the music of Patti Smith and the Pretenders in juvenile hall, which she was greatly influenced by: "You had these two iconic women, and I realized that you could do something that was completely subversive that didn't involve violence [or] felonies," said Love. "I stopped making trouble. I stopped." As a teenager, Love named Flipper, Kate Bush, Soft Cell, Lou Reed, and Dead Kennedys among her favorite artists.

Most prominently, Love was influenced by a multitude of new wave and post-punk bands, such as Echo and the Bunnymen, The Smiths, The Teardrop Explodes, and Joy Division. While in Ireland at age fifteen, she saw the The Virgin Prunes perform live in Dublin, and said the experience "framed her [music career]". Her varying genre interests were illustrated in a 1991 interview with Flipside, in which she stated: "There's a part of me that wants to have a grindcore band and another that wants to have a Raspberries-type pop band", also citing her admiration for Neil Young. Conversely, Love also embraced the influence of experimental and punk rock groups, including Sonic Youth, Swans, Big Black, The Germs, and The Stooges. Love has also expressed great admiration for Fleetwood Mac, with Hole covering their track "Gold Dust Woman" in 1996, as well as using sampling from "Rhiannon" on their noise track "Starbelly" from Pretty on the Inside.

Artistry

Musically, Love has been consistently noted by critics for her layering of harsh and abrasive riffs which often bury more sophisticated musical arrangements. Hole's incorporation of both punk rock and power pop sounds illustrates the band's often divergent musical style, which drew influence from contradictory genres. In 1998, Love stated: "[Hole has] always been a pop band. We always had a subtext of pop. I always talked about it, if you go back... what'll sound like some weird Sonic Youth tuning back then to you was sounding like the Raspberries to me, in my demented pop framework."

Love possesses a contralto vocal range. She has been oft noted by critics for her unique husky vocals, and was, in Hole's earliest years, noted for her screaming abilities and punk singing. Her vocals have been compared to those of Johnny Rotten, and Rolling Stone described them as "lung-busting" and "a corrosive, lunatic wail". Upon the release of Hole's 2010 album, Nobody's Daughter, critics compared Love's raspy, unpolished vocals to those of Bob Dylan.

Love's song lyrics are predominantly told from a female's point of view, and her earlier work, particularly on Hole's first two albums, was noted for being notably aggressive and critical toward cultural definitions of women. Her lyrics have been noted by scholars for "articulating a third-wave feminist consciousness." Common themes present in Love's lyrics from her early career included body image, rape, suicide, misogyny, conformity, elitism, pregnancy, prostitution, and death. In a 1991 interview with Everett True, Love said: "I try to place [beautiful imagery] next to fucked up imagery, because that's how I view things ... I sometimes feel that no one's taken the time to write about certain things in rock, that there's a certain female point of view that's never been given space." Charles Cross has referred to her lyrics on Live Through This as being "true extensions of her diary," and she has admitted that a great deal of the lyrics from Pretty on the Inside were excisions from her journals.

Her later work was more lyrically introspective; Hole's Celebrity Skin and Love's solo album, America's Sweetheart, focused more on celebrity life, Hollywood, and drug addiction, while also carrying on past themes of vanity and body image, and Nobody's Daughter was lyrically reflective of Love's past relationships and her struggle to sobriety, with the majority of its lyrics having been written while she was in rehab in 2006.

Live performances

Over the years Love gained considerable notoriety for her unpredictable live performances, distinguished by confrontational behavior and verbose interaction with audiences. In the mid-1990s, Love was known to stage dive frequently, wearing dresses and slips which would often be torn off of her by the crowd, and resulted in her losing teeth and sustaining other injuries. Love's fraught state during Hole's 1994 and 1995 tours drew significant media attention from MTV and other music outlets due to her erratic behavior, which included throwing instruments and equipment, breaking into screaming fits, and provoking audience members. During sets, it was not unusual for Love to go on monologist rants between songs, or to bring fans onstage and give impromptu guitar lessons. Nina Gordon of Veruca Salt, who toured with Hole in 1995, recalled Love's erratic behavior onstage, saying "She would just go off and [the rest of the band] would just kind of stand there." On the opening date of Lollapalooza in 1995, Love notoriously got into a physical fight backstage with Kathleen Hanna and punched her in the face. In retrospect of those tours, Love said: "I was completely high on dope"? I cannot remember much about it."

Love's aesthetic image, particularly in the 1990s, often consisted of "thrift shop" babydoll dresses, and her face adorned with smeared makeup; MTV reporter Kurt Loder described her as looking like "a debauched rag doll" onstage. The style, widely popularized by Love, was later dubbed the title "kinderwhore", and has been noted as an extension of Love's participation in third-wave feminism through its occupation of a female archetype in an intentionally subversive manner.

Non-musical endeavors

Acting career

Love made her first foray into acting in a 1984 student short film titled Club Vatican directed by George Kuchar, whom she was a student of at the time while attending the San Francisco Art Institute. In 1985, she submitted an audition tape for the role of Nancy Spungen in the Sid Vicious biopic Sid and Nancy (1986), and was given a minor supporting role by director Alex Cox. Cox then cast her in a leading role in his following film, Straight to Hell (1987), which caught the attention of artist Andy Warhol. That year, Love appeared in an episode of Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes with Robbie Nevil in a segment titled "C'est la Vie". She also had a part in the 1988 Ramones music video for "I Wanna Be Sedated", appearing as a bride among dozens of party guests. In 1989, Love abandoned her career as an actress to pursue music.

In 1996, Love began obtaining small acting parts again in Basquiat and Feeling Minnesota (1996), before landing the co-starring role of Larry Flynt's wife, Althea, in Milo? Forman's 1996 film The People vs. Larry Flynt, against Columbia Pictures' reluctance due to her low profile and "troubled" past. Love received critical acclaim, a Golden Globe nomination for Best Actress, and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress, for what film critic Roger Ebert called "quite a performance; Love proves she is not a rock star pretending to act, but a true actress". She won several other awards from various film critic associations for the performance.

Other roles include: starring opposite Jim Carrey in the Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon (1999); as Joan Vollmer in Beat (2000) alongside Kiefer Sutherland; and a leading role in Julie Johnson (2001) as Lili Taylor's lesbian lover, for which she won an Outstanding Actress award at L.A.'s Outfest. She followed with another leading part in the thriller film Trapped (2002), alongside Kevin Bacon and Charlize Theron.

Art and writing

In 2004, Love collaborated with illustrators Misaho Kujiradou and Ai Yazawa to create a manga comic, Princess Ai. The story is based in part on Love's life, and involves the main character's search for her place in the world; it was written by Stu Levy under the name D.J. Milky, and released by his publishing company Tokyopop.

In 2006, Love published a memoir titled Dirty Blonde: The Diaries of Courtney Love, consisting of diary entries, poems, letters, drawings, personal photos, and lyric compositions spanning from Love's childhood up until the year 2006, shortly after her release from a six-month rehab sentence. The book was generally well reviewed by critics, and Love did book readings in promotion for it.

In May 2012, Love debuted an art show at Fred Torres Collaborations in New York titled "And She's Not Even Pretty", which contained over forty drawings and paintings by Love composed in ink, colored pencil, pastels, and watercolors. The works feature various women in different emotional states, some accompanied by poems and song lyrics. In 2013, Love announced that she was almost finished with an autobiography, which she plans to release in December 2013.

Personal life

Love has been a practicing Buddhist since 1989, and has studied and practiced both Tibetan and Nichiren Buddhism. She is a member of S?ka Gakkai, an international lay Buddhist organization. Love is a Democrat. In 2000, she gave a speech at the Million Mom March to advocate stricter gun control laws in the United States, and has advocated for LGBT rights since the early 1990s. Love is a self-identified feminist, and has been noted throughout her career for her subversive feminism and "self-conscious parody of female sex roles".

Substance abuse and health issues

Love has struggled with substance abuse problems for a great deal of her life. She experimented with numerous opiates in her early adult years, and tried cocaine at age 19. In 1992, Vanity Fair published an article by journalist Lynn Hirschberg which alluded that Love was addicted to heroin during her pregnancy. Love claimed she was misquoted, and asserted that she immediately quit using the drug during her first trimester after she discovered she was pregnant. Nonetheless, the publication of the article led to a lengthy battle with the Los Angeles County Court in which custody of newborn Frances was taken away from Love and Cobain and placed with Love's sister, Jamie, for several months. After Cobain committed suicide in 1994, Love began using heroin again regularly, but quit in 1996 at the insistence of director Milo? Forman when she landed a leading role in The People vs. Larry Flynt. Love was ordered to take multiple urine tests under the supervision of Columbia Pictures while filming the movie, and passed all of them.

On July 9, 2004, Love's 40th birthday, she attempted to commit suicide at her Manhattan apartment and was taken to Bellevue Hospital, allegedly incoherent, and put on a 72-hour watch. According to police, she was believed to be a potential "danger to herself", but was deemed mentally sound and released to a rehab facility two days later. In 2005 and 2006, after making several public appearances clearly intoxicated (namely on the Late Show with David Letterman and the Comedy Central Roast of Pamela Anderson) and suffering drug-related arrests and probation violations, Love was sentenced to six months in lock down rehab due to struggles with prescription drugs and cocaine. She made a public statement after her release, saying: "I would just like to thank the court for allowing me these 90 days ... [It] helped me deal with a very gnarly drug problem, which is behind me ... I've been really inspired and have remained inspired." Love claimed to have been sober as of 2007, and in May 2011, insisted her sobriety, saying: "That's not the way I live anymore. I try to work a good program. I don't do smack. I don't do crack anymore."

Relationships

Love was briefly married to James Moreland (vocalist of The Leaving Trains) in 1989 for several months, but has said that Moreland was a transvestite and that their marriage was "a joke", ending in an annulment filed by Love.

After forming Hole in 1989, Love and bandmate Eric Erlandson had a romantic relationship for over a year. In 1988, Love encountered Kurt Cobain at a Dharma Bums show where she was doing a spoken word performance, and Erlandson stated that both he and Love were formally introduced to Cobain in a parking lot after a Butthole Surfers concert at the Hollywood Palladium in 1991. They later became reacquainted through Jennifer Finch, one of Love's longtime friends and former bandmates. Love and Cobain officially began dating in the fall of 1991, and were married on Waikiki Beach in Honolulu, Hawaii, on February 24, 1992. Love wore a satin and lace dress once owned by actress Frances Farmer, and Cobain wore green pajamas. Six months later, on August 18, the couple's only child, a daughter named Frances Bean Cobain, was born. In April 1994, Cobain committed suicide in their Seattle home while Love was in rehab in Los Angeles.

In 1996, Love began a relationship with actor Edward Norton, to whom she was at one point engaged, but they eventually separated in 1999. Love was also romantically linked to British comedian Steve Coogan in 2005, and also had dated Billy Corgan in early 1991, with whom she has maintained a volatile friendship over the years.

Discography

Hole

• Pretty on the Inside (1991)
• Live Through This (1994)
• Celebrity Skin (1998)
• Nobody's Daughter (2010)

Courtney Love

• America's Sweetheart (2004)
• Died Blonde (TBA)

Filmography

Year	Film	Role	Notes
1984	Club Vatican		17 minute short film, directed by George Kuchar
1986	Sid and Nancy	Gretchen
1987	Straight to Hell	Velma
1988	Tapeheads	Norman's Spanker	Uncredited role
	"I Wanna Be Sedated"	Bride	Ramones music video, uncredited
1991	1991: The Year Punk Broke	Herself	Documentary
1995	Not Bad for a Girl
1996	Basquiat	Big Pink
	Feeling Minnesota	Rhonda
	The People vs. Larry Flynt	Althea Leasure Flynt	Boston Society of Film Critics Award for Best Supporting Actress Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Most Promising Actress Florida Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress Los Angeles Film Critics Association Award for Best Supporting Actress (2nd place) New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Supporting Actress Satellite Award for Best Supporting Actress - Motion Picture Nominated "? Chicago Film Critics Association Award for Best Actress Nominated "? Golden Globe Award for Best Actress " Motion Picture Drama Nominated "? MTV Movie Award for Best Breakthrough Performance
1999	200 Cigarettes	Lucy
	Man on the Moon	Lynne Margulies
	Clara Bow: Discovering the "It" Girl	Herself	Voice-over narration
2000	Beat	Joan Vollmer Burroughs
	Bounce: Behind the Velvet Rope	Herself	Documentary
2001	Julie Johnson	Claire	L.A. Outfest Award for Best Actress
2002	Trapped	Cheryl
2003	Mayor of the Sunset Strip	Herself	Documentary
2005	Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal's Caligula	Caligula	Short film
2006	The Return of Courtney Love	Herself	Documentary
2011	Hit So Hard
	Courtney In Wonderland		Short film
2012	Sunset Strip		Documentary
2013	Bob and the Monster

See also

• List of female rock singers
• List of people associated with San Francisco
• List of people from Portland, Oregon
• List of people with autism spectrum disorders
• List of singer-songwriters
• Music of California